"Nearly
all
the changes in
which
you're allowed to participate are in things which aren't very
important. The
real and difficult changes are those which give more and more people
power to
decide more and more things for themselves"

- from The Little Red School Book bySoren
Hansen
and Jesper
Jenson.
Translated from
Danish by Berit Thornberry. First
published in London by Stage 1, 1971

Notes

Originally published in Denmark, and first published in
English in the UK in 1971, The Little Red School Book aroused great controversy in several countries, notably the UK and Australia. Although freely available in
the USA and many other nations, it was also banned in France and Italy and,
as the result of a celebrated obscenity trial, it was only permitted to
be published in the UK in a
censored form. Although not banned outright in Australia, it was the
subject of heated discussion in the community at large and the
government, with conservatives vigorously calling for it to be banned.

The Little Red Schoolbook was written by
two Danish schoolteachers, Soren
Hansen
and Jesper
Jenson. Its title was taken from the famous
Chinese publication commonly known as
“The Little Red Book” (the actual title was Selected
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung)
which
was required reading for good Maoists everywhere in the Sixties. Loosely modelled on Mao's aphoristic advice for the
budding revolutionary, The
Little Red School Book has been
described as “essentially a manual for kids on how to
challenge the
authority of
the school system”. It devoted twenty of its two hundred
pages to sex and thirty to drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. The
rest dealt with
examinations, teachers' duties, discipline, intelligence and different
schools.

Although it
generally encouraged students to
work within the system to achieve improvements and reform, the British
government
considered it both obscene and subversive and some Australian federal
cabinet ministers felt likewise. According to the 1972 federal cabinet
papers
(released on 1 January 2003) the McMahon cabinet discussed the book on
at
least four occasions, with several ministers calling for it to
be
banned. The book’s mildly anti-authoritarian
“student power” political
stance was a source of concern, and as recently as 1995 one
'Libertarian' commentator was still criticising it for promoting
“…the irreverence
and
discourtesy
cultivated today (by the New Left, e.g. in The Little Red
Schoolbook,
widely influential on teachers trained in the 1970s”.

But it was the sexual content which really made the book
a hot
potato for conservatives in Australia and the UK. Most
school sex and drug education texts of the period were highly
moralistic in
tone, ultra-conservative in
outlook and intolerant of alternative sexual and lifestyle
orientations. For example,
Julia Dankus’ A Textbook of Sex Education
(1967) bluntly described
homosexuality as a “psychological disturbance”.
Others reckless avoided the facts, with one author even
suggesting to
young women that "your eggs won’t get fertilised until you
are quite
grown
up and have a husband." By contrast, The Little Red
Schoolbook
gave frank,
accurate and sensible advice about drugs and sex.

The very
frankness of the LRSB made it a target for those who were determined to resist what
they saw as the rising tide of permissiveness. On 31 March and 1 April
1971, and apparently at the prompting of British 'morals'
campaigner Mary Whitehouse, the London offices of the British
publisher, Stage 1, were raided by
Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad (OPS). The
print matrix and hundreds
of copies of the Schoolbook were seized and the proprietor of
Stage 1, Richard Handyside, was subsequently charged with "having in
his possession obscene books and seeking to publish
them for gain".

The LRSB had in fact been a good seller for Stage 1 -- they
had sold out of the first edition of 20,000, and a second edition of
50,000 was in preparation -- so, as writer John Sutherland noted, a
police raid, if supported by the DPP, would freeze
all stock and "could have meant death for a small operation like Stage
1". The raid triggered panic in the London publishing world and it was
reported that 20 'leading London publishers' had banded together to
form a protection group and there was even talk that they would reprint
the LRSB with their own imprints attached, but several leading houses
including Faber & Faber quickly dissociated themslves from the
group and before long the publishing world had left Handyside to fend
for himself.

This was not simply a criminal matter. Many now consider the
Handyside case to have been part of a wide-ranging covert campaign
aimed at suppressing
domestic dsocial and political issent in Britain. The first stage of
this anti-Underground
campaign, the police
action, was influenced by purely venal motives. The Schoolbook
raid was later proved to have been part of a wide-ranging criminal
conspiracy involving members of Obscene Publications Squad, who
targeted high-profile Underground publications like Oz, International
Times (IT) and Frenz, in order to
divert attention from the endemic corruption in the Squad. A later
inquiry revealed that many senior members of the Metropolitan Police,
including the head of the OPS, Detective Chief Inspector George
Fenwick, were receiving regular and substantial payoffs from Soho
pornographers in return for protection, and Fenwick was subsequently
jailed for ten years as the “chief architect” of
the corruption ring.

The second stage of the campaign was even more sinister
and correspondingly more obscure – the
subtle and cynical manipulation of the British justice system by
conservative elements in the government and the judiciary.
Largely because of their reactionary political and religious
convictions, these people were anxious to suppress dissent in
the media and to counter the growing public pressure for the
liberalization of laws governing matters such as sexuality and drug
use. To achieve this they exploited Britain's antiquated obscenity laws
to launch a series of
prosecutions against publications
they considered undesirable. This campaign culminated in the infamous Oz obscenity case, which
took place at almost the same time. Both actions were
defended by one of the few London silks willing to take on such
contentious cases -- the famous British barrister, playwright and
author John Mortimer.

On 1 July 1971 Handyside was found guilty and fined
£50, and the material seized in the raid were ordered to be
forfeited to the Crown. Fortunately for Handyside, the magistrate in
this
case was rather more lenient in his sentencing than the judge in the Oz
trial, who famously gave the three
editors to hefty prison sentences with hard labour (although their
convictions were subsequently quashed on appeal). Nevertheless, the
magistrate was called "an obscene old man" by a 'hippy' in the public
gallery, and Mrs Whitehouse was jeered as she left the court, although
she said she was releived by the verdict. The British National Council
for Civil Liberties was lles pleased, calling the case "an
absolutely sickening decision ... one of the gravest steps against free
expression that we have seen in this country for a long time"

When the Handyside appeal was heard at the Inner London
Quarter
Sessions on 29 October 1971, the court found, remarkably, that much of
the information in the book was “sensible and
sane”, noting in
particular
that the book’s “treatment of homosexuality was a
factual, very
compassionate,
understanding and valuable statement” and that the book
contained “a
great deal of advice which should not be denied to young
people”. But,
the
judgement concluded that, on the balance of probabilities, these
matters could
not outweigh what the court was convinced was a tendency to deprave and
corrupt. It upheld the conviction and the forfeiture order and the
material seized
in the April raids was destroyed.

Handyside subsequently appealed to the European Court of
Human Rights in 1976. The Handyside Case was one of the first cases in
which the ECHR set out clear principles for the operation of freedom of
expression and freedom of the press under the European Convention on
Human Rights.
Despite handing down a judgement which extended the definition of free
expression to information and ideas that "offend, shock or disturb",
the ECHR nevertheless ruled in favour of the British government, to
which it granted a
“margin of appreciation” to determine the measures
needed to protect
public morals, and found that the government's action in banning The
Little Red Schoolbook and
charging Handyside with obscenity was “not out of proportion
in a
democratic society”. The spirit of the ruling -- which was
clearly a rubber stamp for British censorship -- is less surprising
when considered in the context of the ongoing controversy surrounding
Britain's entry into the European Community and the strong opposition
to the move on the conservative side of British politics.

In Australia, the McMahon government took a
slightly more liberal view, although some cabinet members were clearly
anxious to see the book suppressed. Despite strenuous
opposition from some colleagues, Liberal Minister for Customs Senator Don Chipp
oversaw a considerable relaxation of
literary censorship
during his term in office. He told cabinet in April 1972 that he would
not ban
the
importation of The Little Red Schoolbook, and that
such a ban
would be
futile anyway because the book would be printed in Australia and
therefore
would not be subject to the Customs Act. However, cabinet asked Malcolm
Fraser
(then the Minister for Education and Science) to exercise his influence
and
authority to prevent its distribution to schools, in an attempt to
prevent it
from
reaching its intended audience.

This school 'ban' became a cause celebre
with opponents of literary censorship, so groups and individuals like
Wendy Bacon and others associated with the UNSW student paper Tharunka,
and
the UWA Guild (the University of Western Australia student union),
decided
to simultaneously subvert the ban and protest against it by printing a
broadsheet, containing extracts from the book, which was handed out to
students
around the country by volunteers, who circumvented the ban by standing
just
outside
school grounds.

Senator
Jack Kane, federal secretary of the
conservative Democratic Labor Party (whose preferences kept
the
Coalition
in power) predictably criticised Chipp, claiming he had
“played a major
role in
eroding the moral basis on which Australian society
depended”. Deputy
Prime
Minister Doug Anthony even claimed that the book was “a
handbook for
juvenile
revolution and anarchy” and that “its subversive
nature endangered
society”. Predictably, the book achieved neither outcome.

In July
1972 Federal Cabinet decided to take "a stronger line against
objectionable and
indecent publications" and to "show leadership to the states". The
concept of an “R” certificate
for books was considered but there were doubts that such a scheme would
work.
It was agreed that a committee would be appointed to decide on
"acceptable community standards" and to examine the need for power to
prohibit
importation of ‘objectionable’ publications. These
plans were never realised, however -- just five months later, the
Liberals' 23-year reign was brought to an abrupt end, replaced by the
reformist Labor administration of Gough Whitlam.

Today The
Little Red Schoolbook is a distant memory for most
baby-boomers and and there would be
few Australians under the age of 40 who have heard of it. It
is now the subject of an Australian documentary, The Book That Changed the World,
which screened on Australia's SBS network in November 2007. The LRSB's
Danish authors were interviewed for the film, along with Don Chipp,
Wendy Bacon and others. Hanson and Jenson revealed that they were
subjected to intense pressure in
Denmark -- Hansen lost his teaching job and the two were
roundly
criticised for being subversive and for "trying to turn
children into
insurgents". Filmmaker Con Anemogiannis says although millions of
copies were released around the world, a large proportion was pirated
and the pair earned little from the venture. Ironically, the LRSB, which
originally sold for just AU$1.75, has now become something of
a collector's item, with copies currently changing hands for between
$30 and $50 on eBAy.